Person:
Atamanov, Aziz
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Poverty Measurement,
Income Distribution
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Poverty and Equity Global Practice, The World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Aziz Atamanov is a Senior Economist in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank. He has been working on poverty issues, measurement, and distributional analysis in many countries including Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, West Bank and Gaza, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey. He also co-leads the Middle East and North African Team for Statistical Development. He holds Ph.D. Degree in Development Economics from Maastricht University.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 23
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Publication
Regional Welfare Disparities in the Kyrgyz Republic
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-04)Kyrgyz Republic is an interesting case to study welfare disparities because of pronounced and long existed differences across various regions, rural, and urban areas of the country in spite of economic growth and overall poverty reduction (World Bank 2011). For instance urban poverty stood at 31 percent versus 40 percent in rural areas in 2011 (national statistical committee). The welfare disparities are particularly striking between the growing capital Bishkek and the other regions. Thus, for example, the poverty in the Naryn region is 50 percent versus 18 percent in the capital. The main goal of this paper is to analyze regional disparities in the Kyrgyz Republic by quantifying and separating the gap in welfare disparities in 2011 into two parts: the first part associated with observable characteristics of households and the second part associated with differences in marginal returns to these characteristics (potentially related to geographic factors). Welfare disparities are analyzed between and within the regions. In addition, the role of returns and characteristics in explaining welfare disparities both at the mean and across the distribution using oaxaca-blinder decomposition and its extensions is quantified. The proposed research is an important source of empirical evidence testing the propositions from the new economic geography. This is also the first empirical paper aimed at explaining regional welfare disparities in a country from the Central Asian region where the urban rural gap is an important component of inequality. The paper is structured as follows: it starts from the background information describing welfare disparities, economic growth and structural differences across different areas. The third section briefly discusses the methodology. The results of the decomposition are presented and discussed in the fourth section. The fifth section concludes. -
Publication
Pathways to the Middle Class in Turkey : How Have Reducing Poverty and Boosting Shared Prosperity Helped?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-04)Turkey's poverty reduction performance in the 2000s has been remarkably consistent. Extreme and moderate poverty have fallen considerably since 2003. Between 2002 and 2011, extreme poverty fell from 13 percent to 5 percent, while moderate poverty halved from 44 percent to 22 percent (respectively, defined using the World Bank's Europe and Central Asia regional poverty lines of 2.5 and 5 USD/PPP). Most of this poverty reduction (89 percent) has been driven by growth, a performance consistent with most countries in Europe and Central Asia. This is substantially different form the recent performance of other regions, such as Latin America, where redistribution contributed to poverty reduction almost four times more than in Turkey. Turkey has also achieved sustained consumption growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population, even during the years of the world recession. Turkey's performance in poverty reduction and increased shared prosperity has been complemented by the systematic expansion of the middle class by 20 percentage points. This paper analyzes the main drivers of poverty reduction, shared prosperity, and changes in inequality in Turkey from 2002 to 2011. The analysis shows that labor markets, demographics, pensions, and social assistance have played a critical role in this process. It further explores some of the mechanisms that have facilitated these changes. -
Publication
Poverty Reduction and Shared Prosperity in Tajikistan : A Diagnostic
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06)Tajikistan was one of the fastest growing countries in the Europe and Central Asia region during the last decade. The economic growth was widely shared by the population and as a result poverty (measured by the national poverty line) declined from 73 percent in 2003 to 47 percent in 2009 accompanied by falling inequality. Consumption growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population -- a measure of shared prosperity proposed by the World Bank- was positive, pointing out that the growth was shared among the less well off. This work presents a diagnostic of shared prosperity and poverty reduction in Tajikistan during 2003-2009. The paper also focuses on quantifying the main drivers of poverty reduction, shared prosperity, and intra-generational mobility (class transitions). Some of the mechanisms of poverty reduction are explored in detail. Finally, main impediments to inter-generational mobility are discussed. -
Publication
One Year in the Pandemic: Results from the High-Frequency Phone Surveys for Refugees in Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06-28)The URHFPS tracks the socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on refugees. The World Bank (WB) in collaboration with the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) launched and conducted the URHFPS. The URHFPS tracked the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic between October 2020 and March 2021. This brief discusses key selected results while providing policy options. Where possible and appropriate, findings are compared to Ugandans by using the national High-Frequency Phone Survey (UHFPS) conducted by UBOS with the support from the World Bank since June 2020. -
Publication
Energy Subsidies Reform in Jordan: Welfare Implications of Different Scenarios
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06)Facing a fiscal crisis, Jordan initiated substantial petroleum subsidy reforms in 2012. The government has also long contemplated how to cut electricity subsidies, which surpass the fiscal burdens imposed by the petroleum subsidies. This paper estimates the impacts of the 2012 petroleum subsidies reform on household welfare and government revenues. It also simulates the distributional and fiscal impacts from ending subsidies in the electricity sector, where the pricing structure is more complex than petroleum prices. The paper looks at the direct and indirect impacts of reform. Moreover, the paper discusses the political economy considerations of reform. While the full removal of petroleum subsidies would have increased poverty, the compensatory cash transfer program the government instituted is estimated to have fully offset the negative impact for the poorer population. The impact of reforms in the electricity sector will depend significantly on the implementation method chosen. A flat increase of tariffs toward cost recovery will put a huge burden on the poorest households. However, a progressive increase in tariffs will generate substantial savings for the government, even with compensatory mechanisms to mitigate the strong negative impact on the vulnerable population. The immediate compensation of the losers from reform appears to be a crucial factor in the successful implementation of reforms in Jordan. -
Publication
Snapshot of Poverty and Labor Market Outcomes in Lebanon Based on Household Budget Survey 2011-2012
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-12-08)This brief is based on analysis of the 2011-12 household budget survey (HBS) implemented by Central Administration for Statistics (CAS) with technical assistance from the World Bank. The survey was conducted during the period of September 2011 to November 2012, and was stratified across nine regions. The sample was designed to cover 4,805 households, but due to high non-response, it only includes 2,476 participating households. Poverty numbers presented in this note are not comparable with poverty estimates for other years due to differences in the instruments, fieldwork implementation and to some extent sample design; and also due to differences in the methodology for constructing welfare aggregate and the poverty line. All regional estimates in this report should be viewed with caution given concerns about significant levels of nonresponse and relatively small sample sizes within regions. CAS and the World Bank are working together to improve the quality of future surveys. -
Publication
Measuring Monetary Poverty in the Middle East and North Africa Region: Data Gaps and Different Options to Address Them
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-05)This paper identifies gaps in availability, access, and quality of household budget surveys in the Middle East and North Africa region used to measure monetary poverty and evaluates ways to fill these information gaps. Despite improving public access to household budget surveys, the availability and timeliness of welfare data in the Middle East and North Africa region is poor compared to the rest of the world. Closing the data gap requires collection of more HBS data in more countries and improving access to data where it exists. However, when collection of consumption data is not possible, a variety of other second-best strategies can be employed. Using imputation methods can help to measure monetary poverty. Constructing non-monetary poverty and asset indexes from less robust surveys, using non-traditional surveys such as phone surveys, and "big data" -- administrative records, social networks and communications data, and geospatial data -- can help substitute for, or complement data from existing traditional survey data. -
Publication
The Effect of New PPP Estimates on Global Poverty: A First Look
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-05)This paper provides an initial analysis of the impact on the World Bank's global poverty estimates of the revised 2011 and new 2017 PPPs published in May 2020. The revised 2011 PPPs slightly increase poverty in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, causing the extreme poverty headcount ratio for the world to rise by 0.3 percentage points to 10.3 percent in 2015 (equivalent to 20 million more poor people). The 2017 PPPs have the opposite effect: extreme poverty decreases in Sub-Saharan Africa, reducing the global poverty estimate slightly by 0.6pp to 9.4 percent in 2015 (equivalent to 46 million fewer poor people). The long-run trends in global and regional poverty remain unchanged. -
Publication
September 2019 PovcalNet Update: What's New
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-09)The September 2019 global poverty update from the World Bank includes revised survey data which lead to minor changes in the most recent global poverty estimates. The update includes revisions to 18 surveys from four countries. As a result of the revised data, the estimate of the global 1.90 US Dollars headcount ratio for 2015 increases slightly from 9.94 percent to 9.98 percent, whereas the number of poor increases from 731.0 million to 734.5 million people. -
Publication
March 2021 PovcalNet Update: What’s New
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03)The March 2021 update to PovcalNet involves several changes to the data underlying the global poverty estimates. Some welfare aggregates have been changed for improved harmonization, and the CPI, national accounts, and population input data have been updated. This document explains these changes in detail and the reasoning behind them. In addition to the changes listed here, a large number of new country-years have been added, resulting in a total number of surveys of more than 1,900. Moreover, this update includes important revisions to the historical survey data and for the first time, poverty estimates based on imputed consumption data.